Monthly Archives: January 2014

While searching for some OpenLDAP recommendations today, I found this very good writeup on salted password hashing and wanted to share it. If you’re generating or storing password hashes, it’s worth a read.
https://crackstation.net/hashing-security.htm

This is a quick post to remind everyone that Microsoft will no longer support Windows XP and Office 2003 after April 8th, 2014, or about 3 months from today. (See this Microsoft page for more info)

What does that mean in practical terms? If your computer still has Windows XP and you use it to access the Internet, you should either a) upgrade your computer to Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, b) buy a new computer, or c) stop using your computer to access the Internet after April 8th or so.

A computer with Windows XP will still be useful for things off the Internet (word processing, running an embroidery machine, etc), but I expect the number of exploits for unpatched vulnerabilities in XP to skyrocket after support ends.